If you would like more information on the sailormail system -
including the history of this interesting utility, please contact the developer
by clicking on the link below

The sailormail system was developed long before the advent of IP
communications, and was specifically intended to support email to and from the
submarines without the use of the IP protocol. In today's world, we take email
for granted, but back then, the lack of an IP link also meant email was not
possible.

The sailormail system started out as a very rudimentary replacement for the
old "family gram" system, trying to make life a little easier for the families
of the submariners.

In the old "family gram" system, sailors would be given six small pieces of
paper, each having a total of 40 underlines on it. Those lines represented
one word per line. The sailors would then distribute those six pieces of
paper to his family (4 to his wife, 1 to his mother, 1 to an uncle .......).
The ONLY contact the family had with the sailor during an extended deployment
was through those six pieces of paper. The sailor had no ability to send a
response back to the originator.

As the Navy began installing IP connectivity with networks ashore, the
sailors were able to send email - but the problem is that the submarine force
still had no IP connectivity, which translated into no possibility for
traditional email for the submarine sailors.

It became apparent that the Navy needed a better way to provide connectivity
with the sailors, so efforts were made to determine the feasibility of sending
email through an alternate path. The Sailormail system is an offshoot of
that effort. The system consisted of a couple of utilities - one used
ashore, and one used afloat. The shore component was basically a utility
which collected what were effectively a modified version of the family gram,
providing the operators on the RF link a simplified means of forwarding them to
the sub. The 'afloat component' provided the sailors with a streamlined
method to deliver those messages to crew members.

The sailormail system still exists - but for a radically different purpose.
Today, the limited time a submarine is at communications depth, coupled with the
limited bandwidth, makes it imperative that we carefully manage what information
goes down that small "pipe" to the sub. The sailormail system of today is
a key component in helping streamline the email going to the sub. A more
detailed description of the sailormail process can be found at the link.

ETRN - This component is used to force the mail server ashore (niprnet and siprnet) to
process the
queue for all email destined to your particular domain. The issue faced by
submarines is that when mail is destined for a particular mail server, the
server with the mail will attempt delivery, then initiate a sequence of retries
if delivery is not successful. In the case of the submarine, these
deliveries will eventually time-out since the server ashore has no way of
knowing when the submarine is capable of receiving email. The ETRN
component is used by the submarine force as a utility to "tell" the server
ashore to start flushging anything in the queue for that domain.